Exercise: Personification of Kitchen Appliances

Next time you need some practice, try this exercise on for size! Look around your home and choose four appliances. Let your mind be your guide, but here's a list if you just want to randomly choose:

Blender
Microwave
Toaster
Stand Mixer
Hand Mixer
Coffee Pot
Food Processor
Refrigerator
Freezer
Dishwasher
Stove

Teapot
Rice Cooker
Waffle Maker
Pasta Maker
Bread Maker
Toaster Oven

George Foreman Grill

Crock Pot/Slow Cooker

Once you've made your selections, write a poem or short story where you bring these four appliances to life. Not literally, figuratively. Use personification (giving human qualities to animals, inanimate objects, or ideas) to make describe these objects in a new way. Does your teapot whistle? Maybe your toaster spits out a bagel. The fire of your gas stove could hug pots and pans. It doesn't have to be complicated, but I ask you to challenge yourself! One final tip: avoid usual descriptions (like a teapot whistling). Your imagination is your only limitation!

Lesser Known Literary Terms: Circumlocution

Sometimes you just wish someone would say what they mean. No frill, no dancing around the topic, no circumlocution. While this device can improve a story when used carefully and sparingly, too much circumlocution can lose your reader and make reading more tedious than fun. Use circumlocution to have your characters dance around a subject, avoid stating something, provide an important hint, persuade the audience, or amplify humor.

Lesser Known Literary Terms: Caesura

Yes, there is a term for that! You use caesura in your writing without even knowing it every time you place a colon, semicolon, dash, or ellipsis. These pauses are important. They offset, they interject, they emphasize.

"The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe is an excellent example of caesura. Poe utilitzes this device to show his narrator's character, his train of thought, and his madness.

I WAS sick --sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence -- the dread sentence of death -- was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.

I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe; yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber -- no! In delirium -- no! In a swoon -- no! In death -- no! even in the grave all is not lost. 

These shadows of memory tell, indistinctly, of tall figures that lifted and bore me in silence down -- down -- still down -- till a hideous dizziness oppressed me at the mere idea of the interminableness of the descent. 

Down -- steadily down it crept. I took a frenzied pleasure in contrasting its downward with its lateral velocity. To the right -- to the left -- far and wide -- with the shriek of a damned spirit; to my heart with the stealthy pace of the tiger! I alternately laughed and howled as the one or the other idea grew predominant. 

By using caesura carefully and intentionally, you can help your reader paint a clearer picture of your intent and, as in Poe's story, of your characters. This device is more powerful than you might have thought.